java

We, as a developers, sometimes, make mistakes or add bugs to our code without realizing. For this reason static analyzers are a handy tool to apply during our builds or during our code verification processes.

Error Prone is Google’s Java bug detection and static analysis tool. It is integrated into the Java compiler and catches bugs at compile time. It supports plugin checks for project-specific enforcement.

Basically, it is a tool created by Google for code analysis and error detection for the Java language. It is integrated inside the compiler and tries to detect bugs in compilation time.

But, let’s see and example. Imagine we have a program with the next line of code:

Obviously, it is not correct and the error comes from, maybe, a transformation between a previous log message to a different kind of message. The compiler is not going to complain because it is a string message and it is not a syntax error. But, the truth is there is an error.

When we try to compile the program with Error Prone, we are going to receive a compilation error message like this:

Nowadays, it is very common to work with JAXB to help us to marshal and unmarshal objects into XML or XML into objects. These objects can be simple object or objects created by us if we use the correct annotations. It is clear that JAXB is very useful but, sometimes, it is not enough with the default values the API is offering us.

Recently, we had a problem with the date format. The external system where we were trying to send information was expecting a very concrete pattern for the date objects in the XML, and the default format JAXB was offering us was not correct. After test a couple of solutions, we find one that it was working very good and it was quite simple to implement.

The idea was to rewrite the adapter with the desired format and after that, using the correct annotation, tell JAXB be the correct format. Easier than it sounds.

The first step is to write our adapter object extending the object XmlAdapter. In there, we can define the exact format we want to use when the marshalling operation is performed.

Today, we have another little code snipped. Sometimes, we need to transfer files between systems, and in these cases, it is usually interesting to have some kind of system to check the file content integrity. In these cases, it is when a checksum can be very useful. Here we have a little implementation done in Java. Simple to write, simple to use.

Today, I only have a little code snippet to take a URL with an image and transform it in a byte array in Java 8, the image, not the URL. It is something very simple, but sometimes, it is very useful to have this kind of snippets in a place where we can find it easily.

Today, we are going to develop a little web page with a form using Spark and Freemarker. The purpose is simply to know how they are used together and how to manage GET and POST request. In addition, I am going to add Bootstrap to learn how to combine Freemarker with CSS.

As its web page describes “Spark – A tiny Sinatra inspired framework for creating web applications in Java 8 with minimal effort“. You can see a previous example I implemented in this blog called: Quick REST demo with Spark.

In the same way, as its web page describes “FreeMarker is a “template engine”; a generic tool to generate text output (anything from HTML to autogenerated source code) based on templates“

The project has these requirements:

JDK 8

Maven

IDE. I have used IntelliJ IDEA CE, but you can use NetBeans, Eclipse or your favorite one.

It is very important to remember in this point that to be allowed to recover our form parameters in the Java code we need to add the name attribute to our inputs. It is not enough with the id attribute.

In this point, we should add Bootstrap CSS file to our project.

And finally, we need to implement our main class that it is going to process the GET and the POST requests.

Nowadays, it is clear that Java / Java EE are mainly back end technologies. In this role, it is quite common for a Java / Java EE application to connect to different systems to collect data or perform different operations, using REST web services, SOAP web services, sockets or other technologies that allow different systems to exchange information without a human being interference.

In complex systems, in addition to the big number of external and internal connections the system performs, we need to consider that sometimes we need to use one or more different proxies to reach the destiny.

Sometime the objects we are using to create and manage connections allow us to add this proxy information inside, but not always, and this creates always a big headache. We usually end, wrapping our object inside others that support a proxy addition.

Today, I have another suggestion that, in some cases, can do our lives easier. This option is to extend the ProxySelector class. This class has been around for a long time, you can find the API page for different Java version:

The idea is to extend this class and implement its abstract methods and assign this extended class as the default class for our system. Each time that a connection is going to be performed, the method List<Proxy> select(URI uri) is going to be called. In this method, we can decide if we need to add a proxy or not to this connection.

Sometimes the maven repositories don’t have all the libraries we need and, we need to add a concrete library to our repository. Usually, this is because there is a problem with its license, something similar or only because it is a library that we have built for our own projects. In both cases, the steps to add the library to our own repository are quite simple.

For this example, we are going to use the library example-1.0-jar and the information about this library is going to be:

groupId: org.example

artifactId: example

version: 1.0

To add this library to our repository, we only need to execute a simple command: